A Plague of Giants

by Kevin Hearne

  “The Bone Giants.”

  That interested her, and we traded information. The destruction of the northern army was news to me; everything I knew about the Eculans, including the Seventh Kenning and the Seven-Year Ship, was news to her. Tuala wanted to leave right away to inform the Brynt pelenaut at Pelemyn what his tidal mariner had done and then return to Rael to report to the Triune Council. But Meara, it seemed, would be staying. She wanted to turn the tower into a memorial for Culland. I’d not yet read his journal and knew nothing of him, but I’d seen what he’d done and agreed that such a moment should be preserved.

  Before Tuala left us, I asked her to report also to the Kaurian embassy in Pelemyn and let them know I’d be coming and would deliver Culland’s journal to the Wellspring after I’d made a copy.

  The courier departed, and I seated myself on the tower top with Ponder, paging through the tidal mariner’s journal and also keeping an eye on Meara as she frowned and set about her work, converting the earthen tower to stone by slowly calling up the rock from deep in the earth and fitting it around the circumference of the tower until it reached the top. Later, she said, she would let all the earth drain from the middle and build a spiral staircase inside so that people could visit the spot, and she would work with masons to create a mosaic floor to walk on. Culland’s uniform, along with the dirt around it to a depth of three fingerlengths, was not to be touched or moved, and eventually sealed under glass. But she needed to work with a Raelech mason to do the fine decorative work she had in mind, and she would go with us to Pelemyn to find one once she had the basic structure completed.

  Ponder and I thought it an excellent plan. The tempest probably listened to ghosts on the wind while I read Culland’s journal and made a copy in Kaurian.

  When I got to his last entry, I exclaimed and startled everyone, including myself.

  “What is it?” Ponder asked.

  “A possibility. A small gust of hope that I can do some actual good here.” I pointed to a passage in Culland’s journal. “It says here that another tidal mariner stole some Eculan documents from the vojskovodja near Hillegöm and brought them back to Pelemyn. If they will let me see them, I can help translate! Perhaps there will be something there to help us anticipate the Eculans’ next move.”

  I dearly hoped there would be. Some shred of vital information that would mean my brother had good reason to die to get me here. Something that would save lives and validate my decision to breathe in all the words of the world instead of the wind.

  Meara finished the basic tower structure near sundown but wasn’t ready to leave then. “We need something to explain what’s here. An obelisk, I’m thinking, which I’ll decorate later. But I want the words finished today. You can help with that?” she asked me.

  “Of course.”

  There being no stairs at present, we leapt off the tower together and Ponder caught us in the wind, lowering us gently to the ground. At the base, near where she would later create an entrance to the tower, she erected a polished granite obelisk with a Raelech-language inscription chiseled into the base through her kenning. I translated it for her into Brynt, Fornish, and Kaurian, and she etched the same message on the other sides of the obelisk in those languages:

  On this spot on 17 Barebranch 3042, witnessed by two Raelechs and two Kaurians, tidal mariner Culland du Raffert sacrificed himself to call the wrath of Bryn down upon the city of Göfyrd, held by the Eculan invaders known as Bone Giants. The wave he summoned crashed through the seaside wall of the city, drowned the occupying army, and washed them out to sea, along with their victims, who returned to Lord Bryn.

  “Gerstad Culland du Raffert, friends,” Fintan said, returning to his shape in a cloud of smoke. “His memorial can be found in that spot if you ever get down to Göfyrd. And you will find the stonecutter Meara there, too. She’s made it her life’s work to rebuild that city.”

  I’d been looking forward to going home and asking Elynea about her first day as an official apprentice, but my plans were drowned by a longshoreman in coral livery. After the bard’s tale, he thrust some fancy paper our way and informed both of us that we were invited to join the pelenaut at the Nentian embassy in town for dinner.

  “You’re expected to attend. Formal dress if you can manage it,” the longshoreman said.

  The invitation promised a “rare dining experience” and varied company.

  “How is this possible?” I asked. “The pelenaut expelled the Nentian ambassador and his staff four days ago. They’re on a ship heading for Fandlin.”

  “This isn’t hosted by the ambassador. These are some fat yaks from Ar Balesh who paid the Raelechs to take them over the Poet’s Range since they couldn’t go through the tunnel.”

  “Who are they?”

  The longshoreman shrugged. “Rich fat yaks. Not diplomats. That’s all I know. Except they just got here. So they wouldn’t have heard anything about that murdering viceroy with the diseased tadpole hose.”

  I caught Fintan’s eyes. “Could be fun.”

  “Could be heinous. Why do I have to go?”

  “Pelenaut Röllend wants your perfect recall. But he may also need your language skills. We’re not sure how many of them speak Brynt, and the pelenaut does not speak Nentian.”

  “Well, I want someone to taste everything first and see if they die.”

  The longshoreman grinned. “That’s being taken care of. The entire preparation will be supervised. And there will be hygienists in attendance, of course.”

  We arrived punctually, which turned out to be early. Four Nentian merchants, dressed in their floofy and poufy best, welcomed us and were delighted that the bard could speak Nentian. They could hardly wait to put drinks in our hands, but Fintan protested that he’d best wait until the rest of the party arrived. He relayed to me their names and what their particular business was, but then much of the talk swirled around me like thin word soup and I didn’t have a spoon to enjoy it.

  The merchants were entertaining at least. Jovial, ebullient types, lacking the restraint of diplomats and projecting a sincere rather than a feigned warmth. None of them resembled a fat yak, but they did appear to be rich. Poudresh Marekh was the shortest of the lot and had taken the trouble to grow a mustache that spread to his sideburns, leaving his chin bare. He represented a collective of Nentian llama ranchers and sold everything from their curly wool to combs carved from their hooves. Ghurang Bokh was quite clearly into tanning and leathers of all kinds, and he was the sort to wear his products as a walking advertisement. Even his hair was plaited and run through broad tooled leather circles fastened with a wooden pin. Subodh Ramala was an older man, comfortable with his jowls and wattled neck and perhaps the most tense of the lot despite the smile pasted onto his face. He was a distributor for smoked and cured Nentian meats such as chaktu, khern, and even borchatta. The last merchant was tallest of the lot and had grown a scraggly goatee on his chin in an attempt to hide the apple in his throat. Fintan said he was “a purveyor of fine footwear—a bootmonger, if you will,” and his name was Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs.

  “He gave you three names?”

  “He did. Said it helped people not blessed with perfect recall remember him.”

  “The boots help, too, no doubt,” I said, for they were undeniably rich, the uppers sparkling with mosaics of inlaid semiprecious stones. “Why are they here and so anxious to meet the pelenaut?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  And we didn’t get to, at least right then, for the pelenaut arrived with his entourage, and the introductions could begin anew. He had three hygienists with him, and apparently another had been in the kitchen all day with a couple of mariners and longshoremen as the food was being prepared. The three newly arrived ones immediately set about checking the liquors for poisons, and once they declared them safe, everyone relaxed a bit. The pelenaut proposed a toast to our distant friends the Nentians, and no sooner had we drunk than a longshoreman announced that dinner was ready and we move
d from the parlor into the embassy’s dining room.

  Platters of Nentian charcuterie and sliced rounds of chaktu cheese waited there, thanks to Subodh Ramala, but I was far more excited to see the Brynt foods spread out there: some meats and vegetables I hadn’t seen in some time—or, indeed, ever. There was an entire scurry of roasted meat squirrels, for example. Hunting them must have been extraordinarily dangerous. There was also fresh broiled moonscale, fire-glazed swamp duck, and some rare wild fyndöl mushrooms sauteéd in even rarer Fornish cream butter. These merchants had really spared no expense to impress us. That only made me more curious about what they wanted.

  Jahm Jeikhs couldn’t wait to get to that and began to speak of it in halting Brynt as soon as we sat down, clearing his throat and saying, “Pelenaut Röllend, I’d like to speak of some vital matters in Ghurana Nent—” but Rölly held up a hand to stop him.

  “Time enough for that after we’ve eaten, Jahm. I’m famished, and that’s a vital matter as well. Let’s enjoy this extraordinary meal.”

  “Surely we can do both?” Certainly not a diplomatic reply; he’d been given an undeniable cue to wait until later but chose to ignore it. My friend just smiled at him.

  “We could, but a dinner like this is a rare treat. Please eat first and then we’ll talk.”

  “Eat first? We didn’t travel all this way to eat, but all right.” The bootmonger’s long fingers darted forward to the swamp duck resting in a shallow pool of orange glaze, and he tore off a wing and crammed it into his mouth. “I’m eating,” he said, his words muffled by the food, and everyone stared at him, aware that he was jumping into a pool of embarrassment but unable to do anything but look on. “Mmm! So good! Delicious! I want some more of that!” He grabbed the swamp duck with both hands and simply tore at either breast in a fantastically rude spectacle and moaned as he brought the hunks of greasy meat to his mouth. “Oh, mmm! So saucy!” His cheeks bulged with the flesh, and he kept cramming it in faster than he could chew. Trickles of the sticky orange glaze dribbled down his chin and soaked his goatee, turning it into a glistening rope of hair. When he couldn’t fit any more in, he glanced at his countrymen, who universally wore expressions of horror at his behavior, and he laughed, necessarily spitting some of the duck out to do so. That only made him laugh harder.

  “Aha ha ha ha!” he cried, duck bits spraying across the table, but when he took a breath to continue, his eyes boggled in panic and he wheezed, spitting the rest out without even trying to keep it in. He clutched at his throat and attempted to breathe but couldn’t.

  “Hygienist!” Röllend barked, worried that the food might have been poisoned somehow after all and perhaps a hygienist might still be able to purify his blood. One of the hygienists rushed to the Nentian’s side and placed a hand on his neck, using her kenning to search for poison in his system. Jahm continued to struggle, slowly turning blue from lack of oxygen and pointing at his throat as if we weren’t aware there was a problem. The hygienist shook her head.

  “He’s not poisoned. He’s choking.” She began to pound him on the back, not being gentle about it either, and Jahm’s choking noises changed tenor but didn’t cease. The bone he must have inhaled was lodged firmly in his airway and refused to budge. Duck bones can be broad and flat, and even if they are hollow, they are excellent at blocking air. The Nentian’s complexion continued to go pale and blue until his eyes rolled up and his head crashed to the table, his long fine hair mired in swamp duck meat, causing both Poudresh and Ghurang to leap up and join in pounding the abyss out of his back to eject the bone.

  They failed, and Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs died there in front of us, ending the dinner before it truly began.

  The surviving merchants and the pelenaut all floated experimental sentences to express their shock and deep regret, having never been trained in what to say when someone dies at your dinner party.

  I turned to the bard on my right and said in a low voice intended only for him, “That was certainly a rare dining experience. I’ve never seen someone kill himself with a glazed duck before.”

  “You realize I can’t let him die like that for nothing, don’t you?” the bard whispered back to me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have to write a song about this. Kids can learn a lesson from poor old Jahm. Take your time eating and chew your food.”

  “Fintan. No.”

  “How can I pass this up? ‘The Saucy Fire-Glazed Swamp Duck Death of Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs.’ The tale of his demise will live longer than he did!”

  The pelenaut asked a question that distracted both of us from possible morality songs. “Might any of you know what he was so anxious to talk about?”

  The merchants all nodded, and Subodh spoke for the others in Nentian, which Fintan then translated. “We were hoping we could convince you to send at least a few hygienists back to Ghurana Nent. Our people are suffering and our businesses flagging without their aid.”

  “It saddens me to hear that, and it’s regrettable,” Pelenaut Röllend said, “and I do hope to allow our hygienists to resume work abroad in the future. At present, however, we need them here to recover from the devasting aftermath of the invasion.”

  “But you have so many here tonight,” Subodh protested. “Four of them when one would have sufficed. Surely you can spare one or two for Ghurana Nent. I ask not merely for myself but on behalf of the viceroys and even the king, who helped us get here.”

  “I can’t spare them, no. They are here tonight after working all day in Survivor Field as a favor to me. And tomorrow they will go out there again. I wish I could give you better news, but you have my assurances that we will send hygienists abroad as soon as we can afford to.”

  “Sir,” Poudresh Marekh pleaded in Brynt, his mustache quivering, “at the risk of leaving my llamas out to play with bloodcats, it’s the king. He’s not well. And it threatens us all. We need a hygienist for the king.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s unstable. Going mad, in fact, though I will thank you not to repeat that to him. And he has our families. If we don’t come back with a hygienist, he has promised to strap them to the posts of Kalaad and let his cheek raptor tear their faces off.”

  The pelenaut snorted. “We’re talking about Bhadram Ghanghuli, right? Since when does he have a cheek raptor? That sounds like Viceroy Melishev Lohmet.”

  The Nentians all traded looks of alarm and bemusement, and Fintan, I noticed, covered his eyes with one hand. Ghurang Bokh was the first to venture, “But it is Melishev Lohmet.”

  “Who is?”

  “The king,” Subodh said. “Melishev Lohmet is the king now.”

  The pelenaut and I and every other Brynt in the room turned to Fintan. Rölly said, “Fintan, is this true?”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  The pelenaut gaped, then shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, but I thought you knew! How could you not?”

  “Well, we’ve been a bit busy, and the Nentians never use their king’s name, do they? They just call him the king. So I rely on the ambassador to tell me when there’s someone new sitting on the throne.”

  “You threw him out a few days ago,” I pointed out.

  “He didn’t know anyway. He was still calling Melishev a viceroy. And with the Granite Tunnel closed it’s no wonder we haven’t heard anything. We’ve had almost zero trade from Ghurana Nent since then. When did this happen?”

  The question was directed at Fintan, but Subodh answered. “Two months ago.”

  “Two months? Neither I nor the ambassador heard anything for two months? How is that possible?”

  “Like you, we have been busy,” Subodh said, shrugging helplessly. “In the worst possible way.”

  The pelenaut fumed and took a couple of deep breaths before saying, “Fintan.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t suppose Melishev’s coup is part of your tale in the coming days?”

  �
��It is.”

  “And Bhadram Ghanghuli, the former king? What happened to him?”

  “Do you want all the details?”

  “No; just give me the short version.”

  “He’s dead.”

  The pelenaut grimaced and clenched his fists. “Do you have any idea how angry I am with you right now? I want to beat you senseless with the biggest kraken cock in the abyss.”

  “I’m very sorry, sir. I truly thought you would have been informed through other channels, and we just haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet.”

  The pelenaut said, “Oh, you can be sure I’ll be following up through other channels. Never mind the Nentian embassy. Why hasn’t the Raelech embassy spoken to me about a change of leadership in Ghurana Nent? Or the Fornish, for that matter?”

  “They may not know either, sir,” Subodh said, drawing all eyes to him. “I mean, now that I think about it. The king has been, uh. What’s the word?” He said something in Nentian, and Fintan translated.

  “Paranoid.”

  “That’s it, thank you,” Subodh said. “Paranoid. And violent. He is not well.”

  “Yes, we’ve been hearing about that from the bard.” Röllend turned sharply to Fintan and said, “You’re not embellishing him, right? He truly is the shitsnake you’ve described?”

  “He is. If anything, I’ve been casting him in the best possible light.”

  “Bryn drown me, then.” He returned his gaze to Subodh and the others. “I have to tell you, kind sirs, I’m not inclined to help him. He’s a casual murderer and cares nothing for the suffering of his people.”

  Panic grew in the Nentians’ eyes, and they all spoke at once some variation of “But sir, our families—”

  Pelenaut Röllend held up a hand to silence them. “I didn’t say I’m not inclined to help you. I’m just not inclined to help Melishev Lohmet. Let me think on this, consult with some advisers, and try to come up with a solution.” He looked down at the body of Jahm Joumeloh Jeikhs, whose face was still planted in his plate of decadent swamp duck sauce. “I assume Melishev has his family, too?”